Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 287, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

Work was insanely busy today.  So busy that I did not even get a chance to leave for lunch.  And I got stuck late at the end of the day.  Not a fun way to spend Valentine’s Day.

It was an exhausting day.  Running from one thing to another and never getting a chance to relax.  In the middle of the afternoon I ran over to the gas station across the street just to get diet Mountain Dew and some almonds to eat at my desk as my food for the day.  I had been planning on going home at lunch and getting something to eat there but I was just so busy that I never managed to leave the office.

We made reservations to go to Brookhaven this evening for their kids’ night special event in the main clubhouse.  But I got stuck at work late.  I had already buffered knowing that I couldn’t get out when I wanted but I figured since we can often get there at a quarter after five on Tuesday nights that we would be safe scheduling for six.  Nope.  We ended up arriving at seven – with only minutes to spare for the kids’ activities.  Had we been just ten minutes later we would have missed the show and that would have been really sad because Liesl had the most amazing time.

For the kids they did a marionette show with a real puppeteer from puppetry.org.  Liesl thought that this was really awesome.  I took her up to sit on the floor with all of the other kids, there were twenty or more easily, but she was probably the youngest so I sat on the floor with her and she sat on my lap.  This was the first live show of this nature that she has ever seen so this was really novel for her.  She had so much fun.  She was riveted to the whole thing.  It was so adorable watching her watch the show.  We are so glad that we made it out for this tonight.  This was perfect.

After the puppet show Liesl went and did facepainting.  She got a unicorn on her cheek.  She was very excited about that.

Dinner was good but very much cheating for our diet.  There was almost no protein for us which was tough so I ended up having two salads and some pasta.  We cheated and got some dessert too.  But the food was good, just not as healthy as it should have been.  I will likely be fasting tomorrow to pay for this.

Luciana had a good time but we were so late getting to Brookhaven that she was exhausted and just wanted to go to sleep for the last half an hour that we were there.  She tried eating a cupcake tonight, well, the frosting at least.  She shared one with Dominica.  Luciana had fun overall and she did come sit and watch some of the puppet show but was much more interested in watching the people and spent much of the time facing backwards trying to get peoples’ attention because that is how she is.

We got home and Luciana was practically asleep in the car which never happens.  Liesl was awake but tired.  She watched one episode of Blue’s Clues and it was right off to bed.  I read her some stories and she was happy to climb into bed and call it a night – still with the unicorn on her cheek.  It was a good evening for a little Liesl.

Dominica and I went straight to bed.  We were both pretty tired.  Today was a really long day.

Medifast Status: Day 286, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

My “tight” 34″ jeans that I bought recently are starting to get loose now.  I can’t believe it.  I never thought that I would even begin to squeeze into 34″ jeans again and now I have to worry that these may not be the final size of jeans that I will own before my diet is done.  That is crazy.

I got up this morning and, not surprisingly, there were phone issues and I had to jump on that right away.  I worked for probably forty-five minutes, trained Dominica on some stuff and then got showered, dressed and drove in to the office.

I came home for lunch and spent the entire time doing more phone work but, when my lunch break was done, it appeared that everything was finally working the way that it should be and, it would appear, that there are no more pressing issues.  Pheww.  Four days is too long to be working on a project like that.

After lunch the remaining issues seem to have been resolved, at least for the moment.  So back to the office with me.

I had a very short evening between getting out of work and having a dinner meeting.  So I ran home so that I could get a little bit of time, a little less than two hours, with Liesl and Luciana.  I was home long enough that Luciana went to bed before I left.  Then at seven I drove back down to Las Colinas to meet some people at Sfuzzi to discuss phone systems.

We had a nice dinner, Sfuzzi does an amazing eggplant parm, and were there until probably ten.  Then back home.  Liesl was already asleep when I got home.  Today was a long day following a long weekend.

I went to bed on the early side.  Dominica stayed up later without me.

Medifast Status: Day 285, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

What a disaster of a day.  I started off with getting paged out at seven in the morning.  I got up and worked for a while but was so tired that it was straight back to bed for me.  Oreo appreciated that I came back to bed.  We snuggled for another four hours.  I’m sure that he liked that a lot.  He got back under the covers and acted like I never left.

I really needed the sleep both after working so hard yesterday and getting to bed so late.  It was afternoon when I finally got up.  I checked my phone and Dominica and the girls had left Houston before nine this morning so they would be rolling in in the not too distant future.  So I got up and hit the shower.  It might seem like I slept a really long time but when you take into account when I went to bed and that I got up in the middle to work for a while it turns out that yes, I got a full night’s sleep, but no, I did not get even nine hours.  So hardly a dramatic case of sleeping in.

Dominica called to say that she was home whilst I was still showering.  I got out and got dressed and helped her unpack the car.  The girls were really happy to see me and I them.  Liesl had to tell me all about her trip and Luciana just wanted me to hold her and hold her.

Pretty much my entire day ended up being consumed by working on the phone systems still from yesterday.  That sucked a lot.  I had been hoping to have a nice, fun day and get to spend it working on my Ruby on Rails project but no such luck.  I never even made it to my desk – not once all day.  I set up in the playroom so that at least I could be near to the family and I worked from there all day.  And by all day I really mean it, from the moment I got out of the shower and was done getting everyone into the house until one o’clock in the morning.  That was all that I did.

While I worked Liesl and Luciana played and Dominica and I put on the oldish television show Grounded for Life which failed to be a classic but wasn’t a bad sitcom from the early 2000s.  It’s entertaining and it is our kind of show.  It makes a good example of a generic sitcom of the era.  Very middle of the road.  Good to have on in the background.

We really did nothing else today.  The day was completely consumed by the telephony project that needed my undivided attention.  No fun at all.

Luciana has a cold that she picked up in Houston this weekend.  She is still happy, just a very runny nose.

Liesl was very glad to have her daddy back to read to her her bedtime stories again.  I offered to read her one long story and she said “No, daddy, three books” and held up the appropriate number of fingers.  Too cute to resist.

Medifast Status: Day 284, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

I slept in until ten this morning.  That is not something that I can do when the kids are here.  Liesl has become my organic alarm clock.  She wakes up at almost exactly eight o’clock every morning and now that she knows that she is allowed to get out of bed on her own she does so.  But she wants other people to be awake too.  So Liesl gets out of bed and comes in to our room and stands right in front of my face and wakes me up every morning.  That makes sleeping in very hard.  She has a routine.  Wake up, scare the crap out of daddy, have daddy turn on a show for her to watch and have daddy retrieve for her her morning’s “chocolate milk” – chocolate flavoured Pediasure.

I got to work straight away this morning on working on teaching myself Rails 3.2 which I had set aside this weekend to do since I would be home sans interruptions for nearly two and a half days.  As always happens when I do something like this – disaster strikes.  I know that there was a similar long weekend sometime in the not too distant past where I was doing something similar and a ridiculous amount of crap happened causing me to not get to do what I had been planning to do at all.  Well this weekend is no different.  It started last night with the hard drives in the server that I was working on dying on me causing me to lose many hours of work and effectively scrapping my Friday evening altogether.

I managed to get in quite a bit of Rails time today which was nice.  But I did not get the solid time to work on it that I had been so looking forward to having this weekend.  I ended up getting stuck working on PBX security and reprovisioning issues that ate up a huge chunk of my day.  That was not fun.

I did a little cleaning today, mostly dishes in the kitchen and running the Rug Doctor in the play room.  I did quite a bit of exercising today too, especially with the ab roller and my new dumbbells.

After being stuck working on things that I did not want to work on all day I took some time late into the night to work on my Ruby on Rails tutorial project.  I got a ton of stuff done but I had to stay up until three in the morning in order to do it.  I was pretty tired when I grabbed Oreo and retired for the night.

Medifast Status: Day 283, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

I was pretty tired this morning but woke up on my own on the early side.  I had a tummy ache, probably from some late night snacks, and so got up more or less right away.  Oreo was so snuggly though, it was tempting to sleep in very late.

The weather is quite nice today after a couple days of being a little chilly.  The sun is bright.

At lunch I went to Medifast and had a good weigh in.  I am only four pounds away from the official target weight that we planned for when I started.  That is very encouraging.  But now that I am closer to that weight I really do want to lose a lot more than I initially did.  I neither had a good idea of how much I would actually be able to lose nor did I realize how much I really needed to lose.  It feels great having lost what I have but I sure don’t feel in any way that I am near to where I should be with my weight.

I went straight home after my Medifast appointment and spent an hour with Oreo.  I did some chores around the house and took him out for a walk.  On the way back to the office I swung into Brookhaven and picked up a grilled salmon salad to take to the office with me to eat.

I ate in the office and the afternoon proved to actually be a light one.  I was able to pack up and leave the office at five… and it is a Friday!  This really never happens.  Now to be fair, I had to get home and log back in immediately and work for about another hour but that is not bad at all and I was able to be home with Oreo a little more.

Oreo has started sleeping nearly all of the time.  I’m assuming that this is because he is getting older and his age, combined with his lack of eyesight for the last three years, he just doesn’t have the energy anymore which is understandable.  But he is literally sleeping continuously now.  He doesn’t get out of bed until around seven in the evening and he only gets up because he is hungry.  I feed him, he goes out… but that is his entire day.  By eight or nine he lays down and is fast asleep out with us.  Then we carry him in to bed.  So at most he might be awake for two hours of the day.  When he is awake it is clear that he is getting a lot more confused and is having a harder and harder time finding his way around which, I am sure, leads to him not getting out of bed which, in turn, leads to his increasing confusion.

Overall Oreo seems to be keeping pretty healthy.  Except for not finding his way around well his skin is improving as is his eye.  He really is just getting more and more sleepy.  It is possible that his body is just healing after several weeks of fighting off infections and other problems and maybe this is a temporary thing simply caused by the exhaustion of healing himself.

I tried to work on the DL145 G3 tonight but after doing just a little bit of work on it I rebooted it and it never came back.  The hard drives in the server, barely ever used, gave out after having been shipped by car back and forth across the country several times.  How depressing.  So that machine is probably nothing more than scrap now as it really is not worth the cost of the replacement drives.  Argh.

So I spent the remaining hours of the evening redoing the work that I had been doing on the server on a virtual machine on my desktop so that hopefully tomorrow I can get around to doing what I was actually trying to do this evening which was to be writing Ruby on Rails code.

I tried some new drink mixes this evening.  A traditional buttery nipple is a shot made of 1/2 shot of butterscotch schnapps and 1/2 shot of Bailey’s Irish cream.  I made my own modification of this using the same butterscotch schnapps base but replacing the Bailey’s with Amarula which is a similar cream liqueur but flavoured with a rare South African fruit – the marula.  It is quite tasty.  Dan at work introduced me to Amarula recently.  So I call this new shot the buttery elephant nipple.

I started using Pandora for streaming music tonight.  Dominica and Francesca use this all of the time to listed to 80s music but I never stream music so I never got into it.  The streaming music over the Internet crazy kind of passed me by.  I kept up with the technology over the years, of course, but never really utilized it myself.  Tonight it occurred to me that Pandora would likely be a really handy way to find new jazz so I turned it on, set to to “music like Pink Martini” and let it go.  It came up with some great music.  I really enjoyed listening to it and finding a lot of new stuff that I would never have found on my own.

While I was working this evening, Dominica, Francesca and Brittany went out to a piano bar down in Houston.  Coincidentally, they were doing buttery nipple shots while they were out.  I don’t think that the three of them have every actually gone out together before.  Dominica says that they had a really good time and there were some funny pictures ending up no Facebook while they were out.  Dominica has been wanting to go to a piano bar for some time as I have had the opportunity to go to Pete’s Piano Bar in Addison twice in the last six months and I used to go to Jellyroll’s in Orlando with Eric and Mark back in the late 90s.  Okay, I guess that is not very many trips to the piano bar considering that experience spans a decade and a half.  Ha ha.  Anyway, the occasional piano bar is a fun outing.  It will be a long time before I am looking to go back to Pete’s, though, because being there twice in the same year really highlighted how much they play the same songs and tell the same jokes every time.  You need a significant amount of time between trips to make it make sense.  No wonder they are so popular as a special occasion outing place for birthdays, anniversaries or out of town guests.

Oreo and I headed to bed around one.  I get to sleep in tomorrow which will be awesome.  I’ve been needing to catch up some on my sleep.